Thoughts, Bemusements & Arguments

Month: September 2017

My friend Virginia Moffatt recently edited a collection of essays called Reclaiming the Common Goodwhich explores the way that society, in so many ways, seems to have lost its way. My essay explores some of the original thinking behind the welfare state and what we might do to return to the ideas that originally inspired it. The book launch was in Bloomsbury on 20th September 2017. Virginia asked several of the authors some questions, and here are my answers.

How would you define ‘welfare’? Why is it that we are currently living in a country where those in greatest need are being denied help?

A Finnish friend of mine, Katja Valkama, who was doing research on social policy in the UK asked me: “Why do people say all these negative things about ‘welfare’? In Finland welfare just means well-being.”

Exactly.

The term ‘welfare state’, was coined by Archbishop William Temple, and it was certainly meant to capture the idea that we needed to ensure that our social arrangements – underpinned by law, democracy and the power of the state – worked to guarantee everybody’s welfare – everybody’s well-being.

And the five main pillars of the welfare state still do so today:

Health – The NHS provides us with universal healthcare

Education – Public schools provide us with free education up to 18

Income Security – Pensions and benefits provide some income security

Housing – Housing benefits and social housing provide some protection from homelessness

Disability Support – Local government provides some rather limited social care to people with disabilities and older people who are frail and need assistance

As my ordering suggest – some systems work much better than others and interestingly the ones we value most are:

The most universal ones, with no means-testing

The ones we forget are part of the welfare state

The word welfare – and its associated stigma – seems to attach itself most closely to social security and to any systems that seem to be just for the poor. This is despite the fact that the biggest benefit – accounting for about 50% of all benefits – is the state pension – a universal benefit. We have somehow allowed welfare and the welfare state to become stigmatised; this is despite the fact that the largest parts of the welfare state remain popular and so have been relatively protected from recent cuts.

The poor have been made poorer, by a mixture of economic change and the lower value of benefits

The rich have become a lot richer, but they do pay a little more in taxes

Most people are in the middle and they are about the same – their wages have dropped, but the difference has been made up by benefits (disguised as tax credits, pensions, housing benefit etc.)

Austerity has recently made things much worse the poorest. But the system has been getting worse and worse for over 40 years. Over time its main function has shifted so as to subsidise the incomes of the middle-classes. But this has been managed in a way that enables them to psychologically distance themselves from those stigmatised groups that they see as beneath them. This is today’s double injustice: we steal from the poor, but heap blame and stigma on their shoulders at the same time.

What would you say to those who argue that the welfare state is no longer necessary in modern Britain?

It’s really important to realise that the development of the welfare state is correlated – above everything else – with the growing insecurity of the modern world. Our productivity or average wealth is irrelevant: people can starve or be forced into prostitution, homelessness or suicide even if society as a whole gets wealthier.

Average wealth is irrelevant, it is equality and income security – not economic growth that is most important.

In fact our amazing productivity has only been achieved by sacrificing (often not willingly) basic economic securities:

First we lost the security of the land and millions were forced to come to the towns for work, and they then became dependent on ’employment’ and those who did not fit into this system were forced into the workhouse.

Second craftsmen and labourers lost the security of their roles as machines produced more for less.

Third we discovered, through the Great Depression, and many other bubbles, slumps and downturns, that even a job was no security. We can now manufacture droughts and famines through bad planning, economic anxiety and panic.

We discovered that the modern industrial world is no protection from growing inequality and radical insecurity – what Simone Weil calls rootlessness. These injustices then inspired revolutionary hopes and fascist reactions. This unleashed war, revolution, terror, eugenics and the Holocaust.

The welfare state – which had its seeds in Bismarck’s Germany – was always a way of replacing the basic securities that people desperately need in a world that had lost the older securities of land, church and community.

Nothing about the current state of the economy makes the welfare state less necessary. Income insecurity is even more extreme today than before the War. Our incomes are far more dependent on Government-run systems and subsidies. We simply take for granted the enormous benefits that come from the welfare state and the security – even its current inadequate form – that it provides for all of us.

We’ve gone to sleep and we’ve forgotten all that we’ve come to rely on.

The organisation you run is called the Centre for Welfare Reform. Can you give us some of your thoughts how the welfare state could be reformed for the good of all?

I do wonder whether it was a good idea to name the Centre as the Centre for Welfare Reform. The term ‘welfare reform’ is now so toxic and so closely associated with the changes introduced by the Coalition Government that it is quite confusing. However, I think that a civilised society will always want to ensure that it is organised in the best way it can be to ensure the welfare of all its members; so I think welfare reform – true welfare reform – actually improving how we take care of each other – will remain an important project – even if we’re not sure what to call it any more.

For me the central challenge of improving the welfare state was set out by the philosopher Jeremy Waldron:

Above all, I think the idea of citizenship should remain at the centre of modern political debates about social and economic arrangements. The concept of a citizen is that of a person who can hold their head high and participate fully and with dignity in the life of their society. (Liberal Rights, p. 308)

What this requires is up for debate, but I think we can mark out the two extremes that we must avoid – the Scylla (rocks) and Charybdis (whirlpool) of welfare reform between which we must steer:

We must avoid the assumption that the state is some rational and benign entity who can be trusted to simply meet our needs and solve social problems on it own. This way of thinking is fundamentally undemocratic and it treats citizen as non-citizens – as passive, dependent and lacking in responsibility. The last 40 years, and particularly the last 7 years, have clearly demonstrated that the state cannot be left alone with this task of taking care of us.

We must also avoid the assumption that we have no need for the welfare state, that we can all manage alone, or in our families. Citizens are not lone wolves, consumers or producers; they are people who need to live together and need to work together to build a meaningful and mutually rewarding world.

What this means is that we must look for welfare reforms that are going to encourage us to be the best that we can be both singly and together. We need to create a world where everyone is included, everyone is an equal, everyone is treated as a full and valued citizen.

So, what might some positive reforms look like?

Briefly I would suggest the following:

The basic idea of the NHS remains sound – what we will want to do is bring it closer to our communities. Professionals sometimes forgot their core purpose – to teach, assist and enable.

Schools needs to be freed from the tyranny of regulation and the phoney idea that they can prepare people for work. Education should be more inclusive and focus on building our capacity to be citizens.

Income security needs to be radically reformed, and at its centre needs to be the idea of a basic income – a secure income that is enough for each of us to live a life of dignity.

Housing needs to become a right and a fundamental responsibility of local communities must be to ensure everyone can live in their own community and not be forced out by increased housing costs. Citizens should belong where they live – and they should not be forced out of their communities by ‘market forces’. I believe a Land Value Tax, which ensure property owners support non-property owners will be the core reform required.

Social care – or disability support – needs to be established as a universal, non-meanest-tested right for all of us. This is entirely possible and affordable.

Underpinning all of this – I believe – will have to be a resurgence of genuine democratic behaviour and of constitutional reform. People need to be free in order to be citizens, so that they can challenge, engage and collaborate in order to build the society we need. We will need new constitutional arrangements to establish, monitor and protect our human rights, and we will need a renewed civil society – with social organisations that are willing to speak out and stand up for justice.

I suspect that, along with secure social rights, established at a national level, we will need to pay much more attention to the local. Meaningful citizen action and community life can only becomes possible if some powers are decentralised and so people can focus on change at a personal, family and community level.

Of course much of this will seem a dream. But the post-war welfare state also seemed like a dream. I suspect it is only dreaming that will save us from years of further moral and social decline.

How Australia is taking the lead in disability rights and social care

I have just returned from 3 weeks in Australia where I have been working with disability advocates, families and support organisations. The question we were exploring is how can we best support our own active citizenship and the citizenship of others. I was also able to be part of the launch of Citizen Network Australia in Perth and it was fantastic to hear people’s enthusiasm about building a global movement for citizenship for everyone – for a world where everyone matters.

The trip was also a chance to reflect again on the development of NDIS. Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is without doubt the most exciting, most ambitious and most perilous attempt to reform disability support and to bring it in line with human rights and the principles of independent living. All around the world, we have a stake in this reform, because no other country has been brave enough to introduce such an important reform.

Critically NDIS aims to do three vitally important things:

Properly fund the support needs of all people with disabilities (including many people with mental health problems) under pension age.

Remove all means-testing so that every Australian has the security of knowing that the system will be there for them, no matter their income.

Ensure all funding is individualised and under the control of the person or their representative, so that people can get support that makes sense and enable them to be a full and active citizen.

This is brilliant – if Australia achieves this it will have moved itself from the back of the pack in disability rights to become a true world leader.

This is in stark contrast to my home country, England. Similar reforms in England, which began with the Independent Living Fund (ILF), Direct Payments and then Personal Budgets all promised much in terms of increasing people’s level of control over their own support. However these achievements pale into insignificance alongside the vicious means-testing and the severe cuts that began in 2009. There are 700,000 fewer people now getting support than in 2009, a drop of about 40% – and these problems are only getting worse. The United Nations has severely criticised the UK for its failure to respect the human rights of its own citizens, and their criticisms are entirely justified. Social care in England remains a ‘Poor Law’ service – a poor service, for the poor, that keeps you poor.

We have still not learnt that genuine and positive reform is possible; but it begins by bringing together people with disabilities – all disabilities – families and support organisations to campaign and to explain – not so much to Government – but to the general public – why a right to disability support (what England calls social care) is a fundamental human right. I continue to work with the Socialist Health Association to encourage the Labour Party to develop a more positive and ambitious vision. I am extremely grateful to the Australian disability movement for showing us the way ahead – we just need to follow them.

However there are some major challenges ahead. Having a plan is one thing; putting that plan into action is something entirely different.

I was in Australia when the details of NDIS were first announced and I met with the design team – the civil servants charged with defining how NDIS was to be delivered. My analysis, which I went on to publish (with my usual tact and diplomacy) was that the design of the system was very poor indeed. There remains a severe danger that the system will become enmeshed in centralised bureaucratic controls that undermine the basic human rights that NDIS aims to respect.

Moreover, many of my friends in Australia are the people who called for these reforms and who continue to work to innovate and improve the system so that disabled people and families are put in charge of their own lives. They are now on a rollercoaster of emotions as they see enormous progress in some areas, matched by the development of systems that seem damaging or just plain peculiar. You can read a moving story from one woman’s perspective here.

It would be tempting to say “I told you so.” But I don’t think that’s the appropriate response, and my last visit to Australia has left me much more encouraged than down-hearted.

First of all Australia is living up to its promise to properly fund NDIS and this is no small achievement. Second, while many of the detailed systems do seem crazy, they can all be resisted and reformed. In fact even more encouraging than the progress around NDIS is the continuing sense of passion and determination amongst Australian advocates and disability leaders. They know that they can achieve so much more and they know that they can – despite all the obstacles – make the system accountable. Disability advocates have been able to achieve more change and have created more transparency than in any other countries that I am familiar with, including: England, Scotland, Finland, New Zealand and the USA.

What is more, I see increasing signs of collaboration between different kinds of disability advocates around the issue of genuine choice and control. For example, Vicserv has pulled together a wide-ranging alliance of disability leaders to explore how to define good practice in self-directed support. Likewise the Self Direction Collaboration Network brings together a range of brilliant advocates, leaders and facilitators for shared work on turning the dreams of NDIS into practical reality.

The challenge may be to simply to hold one’s nerve and to holdfast to the original intentions of the NDIS. The current system is changing and evolving in such a fast, complex and unpredictable way that it is easy to be mesmerised by it. When it does crazy things that don’t make sense then its natural to be disappointed and angry. But it is possible to fight-back and often it is possible to work around the problem.

I was struck by how the innovative organisations that I worked with in Western Australia, like Avivo and My Place, were also having to remind themselves that they’d already spent decades working around the rigidities of poorly designed systems. The capacity to respond creatively to bureaucratic rigidity hasn’t disappeared simply because the funding body has changed from the State to the Federal government.

It is important to remember that important changes and innovations do take time and that NDIS involves at least two distinct innovations, both of which are at different stage of their evolution. Innovations evolve over time and go through distinct stages as they (and if they) evolve. Partly NDIS is introducing a model for calculating need, and ensuring everyone gets a suitable package of support. This is priority for the system, and this is moving into the stage of mainstream implementation – Stage 3.

Where NDIS is on the innovation curve

But NDIS also promises flexible funding that people can control and here progress is at much more primitive stage – at best early Stage 2. This may seem disappointing, but it’s important to recognise the reality of how these kinds of changes take. Individualised funding began in the 1960s (in California) and the first UK models began in the 1970s. When I first came to Australia and talked about individualised funding in 1999 everyone looked at me like I was crazy. When I next came back in 2008 I found handfuls of people and families who had got self-managed supports, but they had been told not to tell anyone – they were ‘State secrets’ – in theory not allowed, and if you talked about it you might have it taken off you. Today the idea of personalised support and self-management has been normalised – although the reality is a long way behind. This is how progress happens.

I left Australia, not only encouraged, but also thinking that there is much more we could do to work together globally. The battles in Australia are the same battles that we’re facing in other parts of the world. In each country, where people have been inspired by the desire for citizenship, equality and inclusion, then people and families have been able to find a way through to create better support solutions. Countries can learn from each other, advocates can help each other, we can share the lessons we learn to speed up the process of change. For instance, we might be able to use Citizen Network as a global alliance; we can start to share examples of the very best practice to feed our courage and strengthen our confidence.

We launched Citizen Network in November 2016 and already there are 10 countries who with national coordinators and hundreds of people and groups have joined as members. It is still early days, but we have all the reason in the world to work together for a better world, where everyone matters, where everyone can become a full citizen. Why don’t you join us?